COVID Dystopia: New Flames for Canada Convoy

Posted on by Thor

I asked Pam to view the film with an eye only towards the flames and she found the flames I had in the previous COVID Convoy scene were her least favorite. This is the reworking of those flames. It involved five new layers and using all that had been learned form all the previous fire scenes.

Color is the most difficult aspect to control when there are three glow effects added to the fire. I finally learned that I could duplicate the entire flame and add a tint and hue effect to it to warn it up. I then use a multiply blend mode to blend the colors with the pre-existing flame.

She tended to like that all the fires were subtly different. I might go back and revise several of the earlier fires using what I learned along the way.

For now however I will be tackling the out of focus scenes. I looked at the Minotaur scene last night and it will involve re-animating the scene from scratch. There is no easy patch to fix the anti aliasing that caused the blur. I suspect that will be the case with zombies walking on the beach as well. These are two of the most complicated animations in the entire film and they both need to be redone at 4k.

If I remember right these scenes had so many layers that they started to have memory issues. I am not sure my computer will be able to handle the same scenes at twice the resolution. I might have to animates small groups of Minotaurs and zombies and export them is small batches to later be composited together in After Effects. I will push the program until it breaks and then start a new scenes. I’ll probably save daily versions of the scenes in case the program just seizes up.

I thought I was almost done with the film but that goal post had moved off in the distance.

COVID Film: Re-Animated at Higher Resolution

Posted on by Thor

Last night I re-animated this scene. This image is of the scene being exported from Callipeg so that I can use the animation in an After Effects composite. The important number in the stats on the export is the 3840 x 2160. That is twice the size of the first animation which was done at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Pam noticed about 5 scenes that are noticeably fuzzy. The one I dread redoing the most is the Minotaurs running up the street. There must be a dozen Minotaurs that might need to be re-worked. The scene is saved but if it is at the lower resolution, I might need to redo tons of animation. If I can get away with patching the worst offending areas and leaving the rest, I will of course do that. I will leave that scene for last to give myself plenty of time to consider the options.

Today I might tackle some Canadian flames that need to be reworked. Other scenes needing work include, fuzzy monkeys, fuzzy zombies, and a fuzzy lion. Only as I dig into each will I see how much work is involved.

COVID Film: Firenado Final

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This is the final result I settled on for the fore tornado. It look more than half a day to accomplish with much experimentation. What can’t be seen in this still shot are the flames licking upward and the funnel spinning around the flames. The fire is done with displacement fractal noise and lots of glows.

The tornado had a particle generated center, but I abandoned that attempt. I had to try every variation of blending mode to get just the right amount of fire visible through the spinning clouds. I figure out how to use a gradient map to fade away the top of the tornado into the clouds.

The balloons were separated from the background and all the clouds now spin around the tornado. I also painted a smear of a cloud at the top of the tornado and added displacement to that to get it to spin like the other clouds. Volume was added to the balloons with a depth map but that effects is subtle. I probably could accomplish far more depth in the balloons if I separated them into three separate planes. I decided the extra work wouldn’t be worth it. The shot is over in just over a second.

COVID Film: Fire Tornado in Progress

Posted on by Thor

Last night I got this tornado working in After Effects before heading to bed. This is supposed to be a fire tornado however, so I have a lot of work left to do. For the inner flaming core I plan to use a particle effect which swirls as needed. The plan is to map that effect with a fractal noise that moves from left to right. That core is what I plan to ignite on fire using glows and orange yellow colors.

The other large problem right now is that the clouds around the tornado are still. I need to get them rotating around the rotation of the cone. To solve that problem I will need to go back into Procreate and separate the balloons from the background. Right now if I try to animate and distort the clouds, the balloons will also distort.

I will have to re-composite the scene from scratch. I will isolate the background and make a depth map for that, then I will make a depth map for the balloons alone. The balloons will be composited with the depth map and have a background of a green screen. That green screen mp4 will be composited on top of the background with its depth map. I am sure there are a bunch more fractal and displacement effects that will get added as I am working. The cloud rotation will be accomplished with pin animation and rotating displacement maps.

It looks like I have a solid day’s work to pull this all together, so let me get to it.

COVID Film: Kansas Surge

Posted on by Thor

The next flaming scene I need to work on is a fire tornado. I decided to work on this scene first refining the tornado animation. I learned how to create a spinning tornado using After Effects particle generator. I then used the liquefy tool to warp the spinning column to match the hand drawn animation I had already done.

I then saw a tutorial that created a stunning fire tornado effect. I realized that I would have to buy an add on preset for After Effects to create the effect exactly, to I downloaded some assets and used those free assets to refine and layer on top of the particle effects I already had.

Tomorrow I will attempt to create the actual fire tornado effect. I think I have learned enough about particles, displacement maps and fractals to pull off a close approximation to the effect that would otherwise cost an arm and a leg.

COVID Film: Infected Lions Inferno

Posted on by Thor

I am quite pleased with how this animated inferno turned out in After Effects. I used a layering of different fire animations to complete the shot. The result isn’t photo real but the animation is convincing. For now I have decided that the flaming manes on the lions don’t need to be animated. All that motion might distract from the animation of them pacing.

I still have about a dozen scenes that need fire animations added, but since I can quickly animate this inferno, the remaining shots should be a relative breeze.

I chose a more refined type face for the title yesterday as well and added it to the opening and end credits scenes. I am debating about adding some sort of motion graphics effect to the opening title but that is only in the dream phase. I will need to train myself on more motion graphics techniques to pull it off. The poster for the film looks cleaner and more professional with the new title treatment.

Anyway I am off to satisfy my pyrotechnic lust. I just animated one fire scene this morning, and I am off to ignite another. I need to learn more about how to use tracking mattes today.

COVID Film: Lollapalooza Pyrotechnics

Posted on by Thor

Last night I felt I had finished this shot in After Effects, and retired to eat dinner and relax. However when I woke up this morning I felt I could do better with the flames. This site offers me a chance to compare scenes I am working on to previous scenes by scrolling back over the last weeks work. I really likes the flames I produced with the Pearl harbor scenes, so I went back to that scene and wrote down all the settings used in the flames. There are dozens of setting so I wrote them all down on a slip of paper.

I then returned to this scene and started using those settings across the board. Some settings like the brightness had to be adjusted because these flames are so much more intense.  I am much more pleased with the results today. Part of me wants to use these shapes to hand animate the flames in Callipeg and use these textures inside, but the violent shapes do stand on their own. I have to weigh weather the subtle refinements would be noticed. For now I am accepting what I have with the fractal and displacement tools that I have.

COVID Film: Fifth Horseman Flames

Posted on by Thor

This is the fifth shot in a row of flames in the animated short. It follows the Pearl Harbor scene where a bomb drops and a large explosion is heard.By now animating displaced flames has become a bit second nature. In each scene the flames are subtly different because there are so many variables to the glow effects and the level of displacement I choose for each scene.

In this scene the flames are brighter and bigger than i n the previous scenes since I wanted to match the way the painting looked. I discovered I could layer the flames. I made two duplicates of the fire. One was scaled up a bit and put behind the main body of fire. I changed the hue of this fire to be more orange and I reduced the brightness. Then I scaled down a fire and made it super bright. This became the core of the fire.

I used the painting I did of smoke and animated it expanding using pins in After Effects. I then decided to add another layer of fractal noise smoke and animated it on top of that smoke. This added a nice subtle moving texture which brought the smoke to life.

I tried adding sparks using the particle world effect but they moved too quickly and I didn’t like the look. I returned to the splatters that I have used in so many other shots.

As a final touch I animated the statue of the former president tipping backwards. The guys pulling the rope are out of the field of view in the final cut, so I didn’t bother animating them.

COVID Film: Animating Restaurant Flames

Posted on by Thor

After figuring out how to animate the flames in the Pearl Harbor scene, this scene became a breeze to do. The flames still could use more chaos to the shape they form but since it is only seen for less than a second, I think this works. If I learn some new trick to deform the flames I can return to refine the scene some more.

This morning I added the smoke to the scene. Surprisingly smoke it rather easy to animate with a fractal noise layer with a soft light blend mode. I am thinking I can animate the rising shape of the smoke with hand drawn animation and use that as a matte for this effect. I might do that in a future scene. In this scene I simply let the smoke fill the upper half of the room.

There are quite a few scenes where this style of smoke will do the trick, so I should be able to animate several scenes a day.

COVID Film: Zeros Fire displacement

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I spent the day working on the flames in this Pearl harbor scene in After Effects. After tweaking the three largest flames I discovered that I could cut more mattes with the pen tool and fore instantly cropped up in the new locations.  I kind of wish I could get the flames to lick a bit more to the right but since the scene is so short I doubt anyone will will notice how upward they are.

These fires are all created with displacement maps, mattes, and expressions for some minor animation. I am learning as I go and I might return to the scene when I learn more about how to create natural movement to the flames. I am resisting using stock flames with alpha channels that are sold online. Each scene with flames with either be hand animated or created with displacement maps like this scene.

What I learned form this scene was instantly applied to a scene that I thought might take forever. The scene is in a super crowded bar and everyone is on fire. I managed to finish most of those flames in two hours. I am gradually combining different techniques to solve the problems that are unique to each scene.